BYOD Management an Issue for Businesses

By Nathan Eddy |
Posted 2013-05-09

As the use of personal devices on corporate networks increases, 54 percent of network managers reported user experience improved while using mobile devices, but more than 40 percent indicated their ability to monitor applications worsened, according to a Network Instruments survey conducted at Interop Las Vegas 2013.

The survey found that nearly all (95 percent) of respondents’ organizations have embraced bring-your-own-device (BYOD) initiatives, which allow employees to connect through personal mobile devices to internal networks. Just eight percent of users reported deteriorating user experience conditions, suggesting the consumerization of IT is having a positive impact in the workplace.

When listing the biggest challenges in managing portable devices, just more than half (51 percent) of respondents indicated identifying and tracking mobile devices as the major concern. That was followed closely with tracking security vulnerabilities and patches (47 percent). Meanwhile, troubleshooting portable devices caused problems for 42 percent of the survey participants.

"When members of your sales team are using their personal devices more frequently to access the internal network, IT departments have to rethink how they are keeping end users productive, securing their data and resolving issues quickly," Charles Thompson, director of product strategy at Network Instruments, said in a statement. "Fortunately, today's performance management solutions can help IT teams understand evolving performance expectations and proactively manage user experience when BYOD comes into the picture."

Of the respondents with mobile devices connecting to their network, only 33 percent have any official BYOD policy governing the use of personal portable devices; 67 percent do not. Of the 95 percent of survey respondents who have embraced BYOD policies, 97 percent use notebooks, followed by 79 percent connecting with smartphones, 70 percent with tablets and 34 percent use external USB drives.

As organizations continue to implement bring-your-own-device (BYOD) programs, it is projected that 38 percent of companies will stop providing devices to workers by 2017, according to a global survey of chief information officers (CIOs) earlier this month by IT research firm Gartner.

More than half of organizations rate themselves high in security of corporate data for enterprise-owned mobile devices. However, BYOD does increase risks and changes expectations for CIOs. Unsurprisingly, security is the top concern for BYOD programs, and the risk of data leakage on mobile platforms is particularly acute.

One of the major issues cited in the report is that some mobile devices are designed to share data in the cloud and have no general purpose file system for applications to share, increasing the potential for data to be easily duplicated between applications and moved between applications and the cloud.